breakfast, and about nine o’clock he came up again, just as the fog had begun to clear away in earnest, opening up like a curtain every now and then, and showing clear spaces of about half a mile or so in extent, then settling down again as thick as ever, but each time clearing away more thoroughly, and revealing larger and still larger open spaces. At length the mist lifted for a moment to such an extent that it became possible to see to a distance of perhaps a couple of miles, and as it did so there was a simultaneous hail from the lookout aloft and five or six of the hands on deck of “Sail ho!”

“Sail ho! sure enough,” exclaimed the skipper and Mr Sennitt, as both caught sight of the stranger at the same moment. “A frigate! French, too, as I’m a living sinner,” continued the first luff, taking a squint through his glass at the craft. “Ah! he is as sharp-sighted as we are,” he went on, with the telescope still at his eye. “Up goes his helm, and there go the lads aloft to make sail, he’s coming down to say ‘how d’ye do’ to us, sir. And there goes the tricolour up to his peak.”

“Hard up with the helm, my man,” said Captain Brisac very quietly to the helmsman. “Turn the hands up, and pack on her, Mr Sennitt; discretion is the better part of valour with us just now, and our only chance is to show Johnny Crapaud a clean pair of heels.” Our lads flew aloft like lightning, and away we went staggering to leeward, with stunsails alow and aloft on the port side, steering a course which would take us pretty directly up Channel. So smart were the “Scourge” in making sail that they were all down on deck again, and every inch of our canvas dragging at us like a cart-horse, before the Frenchman had got his stunsail-booms fairly rigged out.

As soon as we had got the canvas fairly set, ropes all coiled down, and the decks generally cleared up, I slipped down into the berth for my telescope, with which I returned to the deck, and proceeded to make a deliberate inspection of our unwelcome neighbour.

She was about a mile and a half distant from us, bearing a couple of points on our weather quarter, and I thought I had never seen a more beautiful sight than she presented, as she came foaming after us, with the sun lighting up her snowy canvas and flashing brightly from her burnished copper as she rose on the crest of the swell, showing her cutwater half-way down to the keel. Her sails were evidently new—so new, indeed, that they had scarcely had time to stretch to their proper dimensions—and her paint looked fresh and clean; these circumstances impressing the acute Mr Sennitt with 

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